


just know this too shall pass

by advantagetexas



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, ad hoc therapy, also im a psych major specializing in trauma therapy, let them be happy, let these sweet boys get better, so this is probably pretty preachy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 03:03:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8561104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/advantagetexas/pseuds/advantagetexas
Summary: Tucker has reoccurring nightmares that seem to never end, and he's sure that nobody can possibly help him. Wash, though, he's been there, he knows what it's like to be so deep in the trench that you can't see the sun. And maybe if he can help Tucker, if even just a little, then maybe he'll have finally done something worthwhile.





	

     The voices became unbearable within an instant, descending into a cacophonous and terrible symphony of information overload. He could almost feel the different colors pulsating beneath his eyelids. Yellow, blue, green, purple, black, teal, and a shining fiery red, all vying for his mental attention all at once. It was the most excruciating thing he’d ever experienced, and it was still happening, still hammering at his brain.

     And then the voices stopped.

     He got a mere second of reprieve before they started up again.

     “Weak,” the voice of Sigma sneered from somewhere deep in his head.

     “Feeble-minded,” Gamma seemed to agree.

     “Useless,” twin voices he’d never heard before droned in unison.

     “Incompetent,” O’Malley seemed to growl directly into his soul.

     “Entirely hopeless,” Delta’s calm voice was almost the worst, because he knew that it was objective. Devoid of emotion. Devoid of bias. But he’d been here before, heard this before. He knew this wasn’t the worst. It was the next one, the child, which really hit him hardest. Theta. Just as he braced for the word he always dreaded, he heard something else. Something that seemed to draw him out of his nightmarish reverie.

\-------------

     Tucker’s eyes opened to the familiar dark of his room, the slightest bit of early morning sun shining in through the window. Something was different, though. Usually when he had these nightmares he would wake up alone, but this time there was someone sitting upright next to him, softly humming a song he didn’t recognize. He scrambled to sit upright, too, backing away from the person, but stopping when he found himself looking into Wash’s concerned blue eyes.

     “What the fuck are you doing in my room?!” he yelled, inwardly wincing at the fearful crack in his voice.

     “Shhh, stop fighting it,” Wash replied, looking not directly at Tucker, but rather, at the wall over his shoulder.

     “What?”

     “Stop fighting it. You keep fighting it, and that’s why it keeps fighting back so hard. You have to let yourself feel it,” Wash says calmly, which only makes Tucker angrier. How dare this motherfucker think he even has a clue as to what he’s going through? How could he possibly know?

     “Fuck you,” Tucker responds, pulling more of the blanket over to cover-up with. “Stop trying to be a therapist for shit that you don’t understand.” Wash laughs at that, a short breathy chuckle that if he didn’t know better, Tucker might almost classify as a sob. Wash doesn’t say anything, just turns so that his shoulders are facing Tucker and...oh.

     There are lightning bolt scars covering his neck, radiating out from a port directly in the middle and disappearing underneath his collar and around the sides of his neck and across his collarbones. Every so often, a dull blue spark goes through one of them and peters out.

     Wash gets up without a word, leaving the room and closing the door on his way out, leaving Tucker absolutely bewildered. He sits there in shock for a few minutes, unable to process what just happened, before jolting into motion. He quickly throws on a pair of pants before going after Wash. He catches him just as he’s about to go into his own room, and as the older man waits there, waiting for him to say something, he finds that he can’t. He doesn’t know what he wants to ask. He doesn’t know why he even did this.

     “I…I don’t want to talk about it,” he hears himself saying. “Not yet.” Wash just nods, leaning against the frame of his door. His hands are in the pockets of his pajamas, and his eyes are still ringed heavily with sleep. This is probably the most relaxed Tucker’s ever seen him.

     “That’s okay. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

     “I...I don’t?”

     “Not until you feel like you’re ready to.”

     “Then why...”Tucker pauses, choosing his words carefully, “why did you tell me that then. If you weren’t trying to start some stupid fucking thing where I talk about my feelings then what were you trying to do?”

     Wash sighs, rubbing at his eyes with one hand as he thinks over his answer.

     “Do you remember that therapist I had? Right after we found a place that would take us? After the whole Epsi-well, the whole ordeal,” he says finally.

     “The hot blonde one?”

     “Yeah, her. She told me this thing once, and it kinda stuck with me.” Wash puts up a hand to cut Tucker off as he opens his mouth to make a joke. “She said to me, ‘You know, it’s okay to not be able to fix people’. And I asked her what she meant, and she said ‘Sometimes you just have to put it out there and let it go, and hope that they fix themselves’.” Wash looks up with something like pity in his eyes, but for once it doesn’t seem insincere. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered...” he says, trailing off as he seems to think better of what he said. Tucker reaches out and grabs one of his wrists before he can close the door to his room, and Wash stops in his tracks, looking back up.

     “Wash, you’re the first person out of everyone to let me try to deal with this myself,” he admits, almost sheepishly. “Donut is always suggesting teas to drink to get rid of it, and Caboose is always trying to distract me from it, and Carolina seems content to just drown me in work until I can’t think about anything but work, and it’s...it doesn’t work. And I don’t...I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to talk about it-“

     “It’s more difficult than it seems,” Wash interrupts, putting a hand on Tucker’s shoulder. “But it’s okay. It…it took me a long time to understand that it’s okay to not be okay.” He seems to think better of what he’s doing, and the small hopeful smile on his face gets replaced by his usual look of indifference as he takes his hand back, and retreats back into his room with an almost gruff “g’night Tucker”.

     “G’night Wash,” Tucker replies to the closed door before going back to his room and trying to fall back asleep. He gets maybe a half an hour before the cacophony starts up again, louder this time. But now, after every word, something is different.

     “Weak,” Sigma’s voice croons.

     “Don’t listen,” comes a second, familiar voice from the darkness.

     “Feeble-minded,” Gamma says.

     “Wrong,” says the second voice.

     “Useless,” the twins hiss in tandem.

     “It’s okay,” the second voice says in return.

     “Incompetent,” O’Malley growls.

     “Don’t let it control you,” the second voice says.

     “Hopeless,” Delta deadpans again, and the familiar burst of fear returns. Fear of what’s next.

     “It’s okay to feel this,” the voice says, and with every word, Tucker can feel the fear start to lessen, if only slightly.

     “Pathetic,” Theta’s voice admonishes, and the other voice chime in with it, chanting “pathetic, pathetic, _pathetic_.”

     And then, just as the chorus reaches its nightly fever pitch, he hears the foreign voice again.

     “You have to let yourself feel this.”

     “But I don’t want to!” he replies inside his own head, his screaming almost drowned out by the voices of the AIs.

     “You have to. You have to accept it before things can get better,” the voice replies again, calm as ever.

     “I’m not ready, I’m not ready to let this go,” he nearly whispers into the void, hoping and praying for a reply.

     “That’s okay too,” the foreign voice replies, seconds before Tucker gets jolted awake by something –or someone- very heavy landing on him.

\----------------------

     “Caboose! How many times have I told you to stop fucking jumping on me to wake me up!”

     “Uhh...somewhere around 636. This is the first time you’ve been wearing pants while you said it though, so technically it counts as one!” Caboose replies cheerily, untangling himself from the covers and jolting back upright.

     “Yeah, alright,” Tucker says with a sigh.

     “Oh, by the way,” Caboose says as he’s leaving, “Carolina wants to talk to you after breakfast. I think she’s got more fun work for you. You always get all the fun work, its not fair.”

     “Okay, thanks for letting me know,” he replies, not bothering to respond to the second half as Caboose bounds out of his room and down the hall.

     Tucker sighs, sitting upright as he tries to shake off the deep fear that gets leftover after he wakes up from these nightmares. This one wasn’t so bad, though. It’s not much better, but it’s something. A start to something better someday.

 

**Author's Note:**

> boy howdy, its been almost a year since I've written anything. i'd like to thank clinical depression and college for fucking up my schedule and depriving me of any creativity. but also, like, why are there so many angsty post-canon tuckington fics? let my boys be happy for once, let them get better together


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